Like, the dynamic sex system is pretty much a series of "if player has tail, allow tail-fucking," with a bunch of numbers and simple calculations to handle arousal based on a randomly generated set of interests. It's about as sterile as it gets.
It literally took me a single evening to recreate 90% of LT's sex system, with most of that time spent writing the various bits of flavor text since I'm not about to straight up plagarize a game that'll likely be my competition if I ever get around to releasing anything. And I did that while drunk as fuck and chatting with friends on discord.
Its a very simple system. And a very boring one at that.
But...
As a programmer who dabbles in writing, the idea of recreating something like that would make me feel creatively bankrupt. You're essentially playing madlibs with sex acts and when the thing that I'll charitably call an AI completely b0rks, it fucks up any sense of immersion you might have. Most of LT's actual writing is all world-building and individual character development, but you're never going to get the same level of attachment with 99% of the other characters you're going to encounter. In a game like CoC you're obviously going to get a lot of repeated scenes with random enemy encounters, but because of the unique story text I find myself more attached to the random tentacle beasts in games like that than I am with a max affection, max loyalty fox friend in LT.
...but I still see why such a basic system is useful for porn games. Writing porn is hard. Writing *a lot* of porn is really hard. And if you try and write too much porn without enjoying what you're writing, it becomes really, really unfun.
So starting with a simple system that can be throw in front of any sex scene is an easy solution to move on.
As a programmer who stopped programming professionally, but then started writing. And then wrote semi-professionally for a short while. And then started programming again... As someone who does both, sometimes the creatively bankrupt system can get you to the parts you actually want to work on. And for me that's the sim side of a game like this. I'm going to need a procedural sex system eventually, because I want to allow NPCs to interact with each other. So now that's done-ish, and I can move on to some other fun stuff.
And with this shit being properly designed, I can literally drop in a new system if I ever make one.
Which is where I think the real problem with LT lies. All this shit feels like the placeholders I've written, but they're not. Everything feels like the system I'd use before dedicating any real time to really fleshing that stuff out.
But you're not wrong, it's really hard to have character development and personality in dynamic sex scenes. I'm sort of trying to make it work by having the scenes be faster, and allowing each action to be more in depth. But I'm also adding a lot of individual content into them, which I know isn't sustainable long term unless I change something.
I have no idea how to deal with companions. I know I want to include them in my own project, but yeah. My current plan is to just include a number of generic content for randomly generated NPCs. But I'm also leaning really heavily into NPC personality traits. I want them to really matter, and I want them to have meaningful effects on the sim side of things. A shy but perverted NPC should behave differently than a super extroverted NPC.
Which again, LT seemed like it was going to go down that route too. And then just didn't. It's like the bones are there, but they never added the flesh to any of the systems. Like, do the personality traits have anything to do with anything currently? I really don't think they do.
Game design is hard. And I really think Inno just never got out of the "that's a cool idea I should do something with" phase. And at this point I don't think she ever will.
